IMPROVEMENT OF THE DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS BY THE DEVELOPMENT OF AN ONTOLOGY Alba Fuertes 1 , Núria Forcada 2 and Miquel Casals 3 ABSTRACT Electronic Document Management Systems (EDMS) is an Information Technology (IT) application that has started to be used in the construction industry as a tool to reduce some of the problems generated by fragmentation. However, EDMS have also some limitations, most of them related to the interoperability and information exchange between systems. In order to solve these problems, different projects, standards and initiatives based on information classification systems and ontologies are being developed, such as ISO 12006 series, Industry Foundation Classes (IFC), Lexicon and e-Construct, e-Cognos, among others. This paper describes the development of an ontology for the AEC/FM projects’ documentation management aimed at establishing a hierarchical structure of the different areas that conform the lifecycle of AEC/FM projects and an interrelationship system between them, where all the documentation created along a project is classified. Therefore, this ontology provides a context-related metadata, that locate the documents along the project lifecycle, and moreover, a content-properties metadata such as identifier, version,…, that relates information to the document to facilitate its research and understanding. The improvement of the Document Management Systems in AEC/FM projects and their interoperability limitations can be solved by the establishment of this ontology that allows a better research, storage, understanding and classification of the documentation created along a construction project lifecycle. KEY WORDS ontology, document management, interoperability, construction project. INTRODUCTION The architecture, engineering, construction and facility management industry (AEC/FM) processes are subjected to the influence of highly variable and sometimes unpredictable factors, the team, which includes architects, engineers, subcontractors, and others, changes from one job to the next and, on the other hand, each construction site has its particular complexities. Consequently, AEC/FM projects are typified by their complexity and diversity and by the non standardized nature of their production. From this situation, a huge amount of organizational information is formalized in unstructured documents presenting critical issues such as difficult information search and retrieval, poor interoperability among information systems, poor reuse of content, as well as of business information, related to the context of use of documents in organizations (i.e. business processes and organizational schema). In order to solve this problematic situation different Information Technology (IT) applications have been developed to be used in the AEC/FM industry. An example are the Electronic Document Management Systems (EDMS) which create an environment where 1 Research Engineer. Technical University of Catalonia. Department of Construction Engineering, C/Colom 11, Edifici TR-5, 08222 Terrassa (Barcelona) Spain, alba.fuertes@upc.edu 2 PhD. Technical University of Catalonia. Department of Construction Engineering, C/Colom 11, Edifici TR-5, 08222 Terrassa (Barcelona) Spain, nuria.forcada@upc.edu 3 PhD. Technical University of Catalonia. Department of Construction Engineering, C/Colom 11, Edifici TR-5, 08222 Terrassa (Barcelona) Spain, miquel.casals@upc.edu